Leon Haughton had visited family back in Jamaica every Christmas
since taking up residence in Maryland about a decade ago, the Washington
Post said Friday, retracing his Kafkaesque entanglement in US customs
and immigration bureaucracy.
Haughton's long ordeal began December 29 at Baltimore-Washington
International Airport when customs agents had a dog sniff his bags.
Inside they found three bottles duly labeled as honey that Haughton, a 45-year-old father of three, uses to sweeten his tea.
According to the charging document, the agents suspected him of
transporting liquid methamphetamine, and placed him in detention.
Laboratory results from Maryland took more than two weeks to arrive:
they were negative. Haughton thought that was the end of it. He was
wrong.
The bottles were sent to a second laboratory in Georgia after the
first was judged to be insufficiently equipped to analyze the liquids.
Although he had a green card granting him legal residence in the
United States, Haughton's arrest set in motion a detention process with
the US immigration service.
His lawyer had enormous difficulty contacting immigration authorities - and for good reason.
The US government had been partially shut down as a result of a
budget impasse between President Donald Trump and Democrats over his
demand for funding to build a wall on the border with Mexico.
Here's
a link to the story at Gulf News.
Best to stay away from banana republics like the US or Victoria.
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